World Languages and Cultures Publications
World Languages and Cultures
2013
Staging the Nation: Claro M. Recto’s Domestic
Dramas
Eugenio Matibag
Iowa State University, ematibag@iastate.edu
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172
Forum Kritika: Philippine Literature in Spanish
Staging the Nation:
Claro M. Recto’s Domestic Dramas
Eugenio Matibag
Iowa State University
ematibag@iastate.edu
Abstract
Near the beginning of a prolific and productive career as a writer and statesman, Claro M.
Recto (1890-1960) authored two prize-winning dramas that were performed at the Manila
Grand Opera House. Each of the plays—La ruta de Damasco (1913) and Solo entre las
sombras (1917)—is a drama that represents the interactions of an ilustrado family in its
relationship to the imposition of cultural practices and power structures under American
rule. This essay proposes that in these dramas written by an ilustrado and performed for
an interpellated ilustrado audience, the ilustrado home stands as a metonym of the nation,
its family a synecdoche of the national community. As such, whereas the plays express
the nationalist stance identified with members of the ilustrado class of educated elite, the
dialogic enactment of tensions and conflicts among their ilustrado characters serves to
work out the contradictions within the class and at the same time to legitimate the class’s
hegemony and accommodationism in a Philippine society subjected to American colonial
rule.
The protagonists of La ruta are nationalist newspapermen who, facing persecution and
censorship under the colonial government, are offered the choice between collaborating
and resisting. The central character of Solo is a medical doctor who, in his struggles to
conceal the fact of an adulterous relationship, reveals the effects of a “violent saxonization”
that has undermined Philippine custom and identity. Both dramas thus complicate the
post-1899 reimagining of the Philippine nation: as a community to be represented and led
by what Osmeña called the “directing class,” which would declare nationalist objectives and
defend the notion of a “Philippines for the Filipinos” while testing the limits of resistance
to the American colonial institutions and registering the effects of their newly introduced
values and practices on Philippine society during a time that saw the rise of the Partido
Nacionalista of Osmeña, Quezon and Recto.
Keywords
Nationalism, ilustrado hegemony, American colonial rule
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About the Author
Eugenio Matibag, professor of Spanish in Iowa State University’s Department of World
Languages and Cultures, was born in Cavite and grew up in Southern California. He has
published research on Latin American and Philippine literatures in the journals Revista
Hispánica Moderna, Humanities Diliman, Catauro, Postmodern Culture, The Journal of
Caribbean Studies, Dispositio, Hispamérica, and various anthologies and encyclopedias.
His two books are Afro-Cuban Religious Experience (1996) and Haitian-Dominican
Counterpoint (2003). He is currently at work on a study that examines the discourse of
nineteenth-century Philippine nationalism.
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Está ya muerto el presente...
Libertarlo es imposible, porque ha sido condenado.
Pues, entonces, libertemos el futuro, custodiando la simiente
que han echado
en el surco de las almas
nuestros heroes que murieron, conquistando eternas palmas.
--Claro M. Recto, “Epopeya de la raza” (1910)
On the night of July 5, 1913, at the Manila Grand Opera, members of the
amateur dramatic society “Aficionados de Talía” performed La ruta de Damasco, a
drama authored in Spanish by the twenty-two-year-old Tayabas-born Claro Mayo
Recto (Fig. 1). “The Road to Damascus” had won for the playwright a first prize
of P500 in the contest sponsored by the newspaper El Renacimiento Filipino in
commemoration of its third anniversary. 1
Recto’s comedia drew public acclaim and
critical commentary, signaling therewith
the resurgence of Philippine drama
(Medina and Feliciano 223). 2 Recto would
repeat this triumph some four years later,
by winning the award for best tragedy of
the Talía competition in 1917. His prizewinning entry on that occasion was Solo
entre las sombras (Alone Among the
Shadows).
The period of rapid change in which
Recto’s plays debuted saw both the
deepening of American colonial rule and
the emergence of the ilustrado elites as
a native political class. For this was the
time in which the ilustrados could come
into their own as the “directing class” of
Philippine society, as Sergio Osmeña
would refer to his own oligarchical group
(Cullinane 339). What was at stake on
the political stage at this juncture, and
Fig. 2
what was left unsaid but implicit on the
1 The rules of the contest were simple: they required that all submissions (1) fit the format of a single act, (2) last for
an hour’s duration in performance, and (3) call for no change of scenery.
2 From The Complete Works of Claro M. Recto, Volume 1 (Literary Works 1909-1918), compiled and annotated by
Isagani R. Medina and Myrna S. Feliciano (Centennial Edition, Pasay City, Metro Manila, Claro M. Recto Memorial
Foundation, 1990). Parenthethical references to Recto’s works of this edition will be indicated hereinafter with the
abbreviation CW . Citations of editorial annotations and supplemental materials such as critical pieces included in in
this volume will be indicated by the last names of the authors and identified accordingly in the Works Cited section.
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dramatic one, was the ilustrados’ role within the larger society, and what was being
contested on both stages was the ilustrados’ right to speak for the whole Philippine
nation. Even a cursory glance at Recto’s two plays, for two is all he ever wrote
in his prolific writing career, will reveal that both are definitely ilustrado affairs:
their characters belong to that stratum of the Filipino elite and educated called
ilustrados, and the author as well as the audience in attendance at their performance
belonged to that ilustrado class or had affiliations to it.3 Belonging as they did to
the more privileged sectors of Filipino society, the characters, author, and audience
of those plays, despite differences of wealth, social prominence, and ideology
among the members of this group, all shared in common their access to European
or American higher education, which gave them access to the Spanish language,
and a particular intimacy of relationship with the colonial regime, whether the
Spanish one of the latter part of the nineteenth century, or the American one of
first decades of the twentieth, or both. Inclusive both of the wealthy aristocratic
layer or the more professionalized middle sectors, the ilustrado elite composed
the privileged 10 percent of the population who enjoyed significantly more wealth,
status and opportunity than the urban laborers and the masses of peasantry from
which they stood apart (Cullinane 331).
Thanks to the intermediary role of the ilustrados in the Philippine society
of the time, a dependent nationalism under ilustrado politicians was taking shape
as the destiny of the Philippines under American hegemony. Recto’s two domestic
dramas, each in its way, rehearsed complexities of this paradoxical situation whose
issues come to bear profoundly and intimately upon the household dynamics. La
ruta’s character Doña Irene, cast in the role of a wealthy antagonist opposite the
crusading nationalist newspapermen of her sister’s family, embodies the ilustrado
accommodation, adaptation, and conformity to the American regime, but she
also stands as living proof of the benefits of “Filipinization”—at least for the
enterprising sector of the ilustrado elite who had cooperated with the American
administration and served as its link to the middle sectors and the masses of folk or
people regarded collectively as the tao. “¿Qué ocurre en esta casa?” asks Doña Irene,
disdainful of the journalists’ inability to provide resources sufficient to guarantee
the wellbeing of their families (CW 246). What indeed is happening in the house is
the question this drama of ilustrados posed for ilustrados, and the answer mattered
to an interpellated ilustrado audience to whom the drama held up a mirror of their
rapidly changing political culture, with the ilustrado home as a metonym of the
nation, its family a synecdoche of the national community.
3 It is important to note that the ilustrados could not collectively be regarded as a socioeconomic class according
to the Marxist definition of the term, since they composed a group that was, and continues to be, internally stratified
and fragmented. Yet the denomination of “class” can fill in to designate the group as distinct and in significant ways
positioned in contradistinction to the masses of the peasantry and urban proletariat. Cullinane bases his analysis of
the ilustrados fineseculares on the identification of “four overlapping and internally differentiated socioeconomic
categories: (1) municipal elite, (2) provincial elite, (3) urban elite, and (4) urban middle sector” (Cullinane 19).
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Implicit in this identification of Recto’s dramas as “ilustrado theater” are
implications sufficient to complicate the Andersonian conception of the “imagined
community,” of which the Philippine society of the later nineteenth century,
reconceived in the “national imagination” of José Rizal’s Noli me tangere, was the
exemplary case. 4 If the vehicle of imagining a nation is printing and publishing,
and if printing and publishing were the domains of the ilustrado class, the interests
and worldviews of those ilustrados who managed both the medium and the
message should not go without being examined. Class differences among the
ilustrados further problematized the ilustrados’ project of nation-building, given
the disagreements—adumbrated in the rivalry between Bonifacio and Aguinaldo,
repeated perhaps in the opposition between Nacionalistas and Federalistas—that
threatened to undermine and collapse it from within. A reading cognizant of
Recto’s ambivalent comedy and tragedy should therefore account for the ideological
function they performed in their production: that is, for the way in which they
worked through the tensions and antagonisms inherent in the ilustrados’ selfidentification, making their case for a kind of Philippine nationalism in which the
ilustrado assumes a leading role, and in the process guaranteeing their worthiness
for assuming this responsibility. This political and economic leadership would draw
from the upper and middle-class Filipinos, including the landed elite, who enjoyed
the exclusive privilege of suffrage, and who would fulfill the role of intermediaries
between the new colonizers and the rest of the colonized. Under an American
administration avid of “Filipinizing” the government bureaucracy, a homegrown
style of caciquism emerged and developed under the guise of democratic selfrule. It was the ilustrado class, now coming into its own as intermediaries and
compradores, who facilitated the entry of American interests into their economy
as they prevailed on American colonial officials to create policy that advanced their
own economic and political goals (Constantino 1975: 312; 319-320). What follows
will be a critical analysis of Recto’s plays that will attempt to account for the manner
in which they stage the drama of a Philippine nation in search of a national destiny,
but a national destiny that was allowed to unfold under the protagonism of the
ilustrados and the tutelage of the Americans. Insofar as both of Recto’s plays can
be considered “ilustrado drama,” since the plot of each one centers on the conflicts
that occur within an ilustrado household, it turns out that the ilustrado home is
where the meaning of Philippine nationhood works itself out for the ilustrado as
Filipino.
In staging a spectacle imitative of his own ilustrado class’s activities, Recto
in his dramas undertook the task of naturalizing their privileged access to power
and thus legitimizing their circumscribed hegemony in the colonial state of the
post-Malolos era. Etienne Balibar’s concept of “nation form” helps to elucidate way
that Recto’s dramas represented a bounded nationhood that sought its collective
30.
4 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism 26-27 and
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identity under American colonialism. Making implicit reference to Benedict
Anderson, Balibar explains how the production of a nation as a “people” according
to the nation form is always imaginary, insofar as “every social community
reproduced by the functioning of institutions is imaginary” (Balibar 93). For in
general terms, the self-identification of a people as a people has already begun
with its recognition by and self-recognition in the institutions of its state and
in the identification of the state in opposition to other states. 5 Recto’s nation of
Filipinos is a nation imagined by, but mostly for, a community still in gestation
at the global periphery and subjected to the form-giving authority of American
colonial institutions. The particular forces that formed this community, however,
go beyond the American mold, insofar as they include the Hispanic patrimony,
with its legacy of religion, custom, and language imposed during more than three
hundred years of Spanish colonialism. The language of the erstwhile colonizers was
of course a legacy mastered by the members of the educated elite and deployed in
the literature written by members of the ilustrado intelligentsia. These traced their
genealogy to the municipal principalia at home and to the journalists and essayists
of the nineteenth century propagandistas who wrote and published abroad: a group
of ilustrados whose history has been treated at great length.6
Recto came of age as a writer in the years of Woodrow Wilson’s presidency,
when the United States could apply the lessons that it had learned in the process
of disciplining the Latin American republics as unequal partners in America’s
business. Recto’s Philippines, like the Latin American republics in the nineteenth
century, was seeking its own cultural identity, but for Recto’s generation, unlike
such intransigents as Macario Sakay and Artemio Ricarte who had led the struggle
in 1896 and 1899, identity no longer meant independence, at least not while the
Americans were in charge.
For resistance to American rule was severely punished during the
first decade of the twentieth century. When the military offensive against the
resistance fighters during the Philippine-American War had ended, the colonial
administration laid down the laws that criminalized all overt opposition. In 1901,
the Sedition Law threatened with pain of death or imprisonment any who advocated
rebellion, insurrection or the overthrow of the colonial government, thus holding
public advocacy of independence in check. This legislation was followed by the
Brigandage Act of 1902, which labeled any guerrillas as bandoleros or tulisanes,
deeming their activities punishable by the same penalties laid upon those
convicted of sedition. Also known as the Bandolerismo Statute, the Brigandage Act
classified all anti-colonial resistance as criminal acts of tulisanes, bandits (Zwick
5 In the Philippines during the first two decades of American dominance, the colonial state preceded the nation:
nationhood is still in gestation; statehood, albeit according to a colonial template or module imposed in the global
periphery, has adumbrated its form (see Wallerstein 81). If La ruta de Damasco has as subtext the narrative of a
nation, it is that of a nation interrupted, waylaid, blindsided—Floro Quibuyen (1999) has said “aborted”—by American
intervention. In this time of moving foundations and shifting allegiances, the question is posed: Who is the nation, and
how is this agency to be represented?
6 See for example Rafael (1995), Jolipa (1996), Schumacher (1997), Roces (2006) and Mojares (2006).
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39). The Reconcentration Act, approved in the following year, forced villagers in
the rural zones of the Philippines, much as had occurred in Cuba under General
Weyler during the 1898 war, to be uprooted from their homes and resettled in
enclosed areas, thus preventing them from participating in the armed resistance
or extending aid to guerrilla rebels. A final law to smother expressions of native
patriotism of an anti-American stripe was passed in 1907: the Flag Law made
illegal the exhibiting of flags supporting either the Katipunan or the Republic of
the Philippines (Lumbera and Lumbera 87-88). With denunciations of the colonial
administration denounced as “scurrilous libel,” journalists of the resistance turned
to literature as a more indirect form of filibusterismo. Periodical publications—
newspapers and magazines in both the colonizers’ languages and the vernaculars—
sought a means of circumventing the Sedition Law. Among the forms taken by this
counterdiscourse were allegorical drama and nationalistic poetry, a nationwide
phenomenon that not responded critically not only to American imperialism but
also to the invading flood of Philippine society by American culture. 7
Recto wrote La ruta after the passing of the subversive, “dissident” and
denunciatory Filipino theater of the first decade of the century. One important
dramatic precursor to Recto considered “seditious” was Aurelio Tolentino (18681915). Tolentino’s dramas included Bagong Cristo [New Christ, 1907], Luwalhati
[Glory, 1908], and Pag-ibig at Patayan [Love and Killing, 1914], their titles suggesting
the depth of Tolentino’s patriotic zeal.8 Earlier in his drama-writing career, in
1903, Tolentino had been arrested for authoring the play Kahapon, Ngayon, at
Bukas (Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow). The allegorical drama sought to muster
resistance against the Occupation by recalling the struggle and sacrifice of the
revolution. Its creation was considered an act of sedition for which Tolentino was
condemned to cadena perpetua (although this sentence would be lifted with parole
many years later).
The persecutions of the “seditious playwrights” had run their course by the
second decade of the century, the lesson had been learned, and the political
oppositionists among the ilustrado literati shifted the focus of their endeavors:
away from the radical cause of independence, although it made for a popular slogan
and an effective campaign strategy, and toward the gaining of political power from
a more collaborationist position. Cullinane writes that “by 1907,”
The “seditious” dramas were things of the past, relics of an earlier phase of the
“nationalist movement,” which would soon focus on politics of a different sort, a politics
that was less concerned with the nationalist ideals emanating from the Revolution and
7 Lumbera and Lumbera provide a list of newspapers that published the new literature: “’Muling Pagsilang’ (1903,
Tagalog [a version of the Renacimiento Filipino]), Ang Kaluwasan (1902, Cebuano), Makinaugalingon (1913, Ilongo)
and Nueva Era (1908, Iloko).” The same authors list as well four magazines that contributed to this literary renaissance
(88-89).
8 Play-acting not sufficing for Tolentino, however, he would go on to lead a rebel band, an action for which he was
arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment (Medina 128).
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more concerned with the realities of elite competition for political position and power.
(Cullinane 124)
Within three years, the post-revolutionary generation of writers would take
center stage in works that addressed, in the place of anti-colonial agitation, the
“polemics of partisan politics in representation of the new political elite” (Cullinane
ibid.). By the second decade of the century, the “Aristocracy of Intellect”9 for the
most part viewed the work of revolution as over and done with, and although
members of the educated elite continued to denounce American imperialism and
wave a standard of independence, this group in reality was jockeying for a position
from which to increase its own power under conditions of accommodation to and
collaboration with the American authorities.
Amidst this activity of reimagining and reimagined community, Recto’s
two domestic dramas attempted an imaginary reconciliation of a series of
contradictions. First of all was the question of the language shared in common by
the ilustrados. Spanish in the Philippines was not the lingua franca by a long shot,
and in fact spoken by a slim minority of the Filipinos—only about ten percent,
according to the 1903 census (de la Peña 80)—a group of those who by their class
privilege gained access to institutions of higher education where they could learn
and master the language, often in universities abroad. As manifest in Philippine
hispanophone literature and culture in general, the Castillian language, despite
its status as a minority language, provided a counterweight to the hegemonic
imposition of English, which had swiftly become the language of business and
bureaucracy during the Occupation. Philippine poetry, narratives and plays that
were written in Spanish offered a version of a patrimony, a national identity that
was to be built on a Hispanic foundation. Recto’s dramatic productions thus
contributed to the vindication of Hispanicity which also endorsing the prerogative
of his Castilian-speaking class for setting the national agenda.10
Recto’s plays thus constitute the gesture of an ilustrado artist and intellectual
to come to terms, using the linguistic resources at hand, with the fait accompli of
American colonial rule. Their action and dialogue, in working out the contradictions
of the new situation, assess the possibilities for a route that will lead the Philippines,
eventually, to independence, while at the same time they perform a legitimating
act for the rising ilustrado hegemony. It could be said that the plays’ scenographies
project virtual mappings of the way in which an ilustrado political class would work
to resolve its disputes and come to a consensus on the right and proper direction of
the country’s leadership under the watchful eye of the American authorities. Recto
thus exemplifies the Filipino lawyer as political “radical” and artistic intellectual
whose call for independence stance creates in practice a space for negotiating an
9 As they were called by Macario Adriatico (cited in Cullinane 340).
10 Gellner’s reflections on the role of the “clerisy” apply to the role of the ilustrado class in the Philippine society of
the time: the literati in agro-literate polities will tend to maintain their distance from the folk culture, even show disdain
for it. The brand of literacy to which this intelligentsia lays claim cannot, at this stage of development, be acquired by
the masses; yet the literati may strive to gain respect for its ideals (Gellner 1983: 10-11).
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accommodation with the American colonial administration, and thus a route to
autonomy for the Philippine nation-in-progress, but within the bounds of the nation
form shaped by American colonial institutions. A peculiar form of democracy will
provide the vehicle for this development: in what Cullinane calls “the collaborative
empire,” netwoks of municipal alliance and electoral manipulations will give the
ilustrados the means with which to consolidate and increase their power (Cullinane
7). Addressing this ambiguously precarious situation from a perspective that is
conditioned by his own ilustrado status, Recto’s plays strive to come to terms with
the realization that a complete and sovereign nationhood, especially within the
shifting colonial framework of the American-ruled Philippines, would have to be
deferred. Patriotism meant keeping a dream alive, or under wraps, but safe and
viable for a future in which the nationalist ilustrado would lead. In the meantime as
well, the educated elite would take care of keeping things in order by cooperating
and collaborating with the American administration.
As Recto’s dramas illustrate, the institutions of family and education occupy
the center of a system by which the nation is constituted and given form. This sort
of drama can be compared to the family narrative that is cast as “romance” in the
conception formulated by Doris Sommer, by which issues of an imputed national
community are examined and analyzed on the intimate and microscopic scale of the
domestic narrative. Just as the nineteenth-century Spanish American novel for the
reader of that century relocated race, gender and marriage as central to the project of
nation-building, Recto’s household dramas performed the story of Filipino identity
that was in process, after its interruption, in which social stratification and the
relations between men and women take the center stage. Accordingly, his dramas
exemplify what ilustrado writing by the second decade of the twentieth century
registered as a sense of an “ambiguous identity,” to use the expression that serves
as subtitle to Balibar and Wallerstein’s book on racism and nationalism. For in the
Philippines under American rule, the Spanish-speaking elite confronted nation
in need of form, one that was more a multiethnic and polylingual dispersion of
peoples than a unified polity, an archipelago that was now overtaken by the tide of
rapid Americanization and a simultaneous anglicization. In the role and position
of one who continues to write in the language of the previous colonizing power,
Recto would speak for his Philippine people, the nous autres called “Filipinos,” but
in a language that spoken by few of its numbers. How to account for the status of
drama written and performed in Spanish at this point of the nation’s continuing
prehistory? As discernible in Recto’s plays, the manner in which the elite ilustrado
rule over the Filipino masses, the tao, can be read in the way the ilustrados critique
as they acknowledge the power of the American-backed press or the Americansponsored educational system.11
11 But the primarily agrarian society that the Philippines still was at the beginning of the twentieth century, composed
as it was of diverse and linguistic communities, still stymied and stultified by colonialism, was not yet prepared for a
coherent and unifying experience of nationhood, lacking as it did the political bonds that would create the solidarity
of a political unit. As the sort of country that Ernest Gellner calls a “culturally eclectic empire,” the Philippines, an
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American domination was to be realized no longer through brutal domination,
but now via the consent-winning stratagems of a policy of “benevolent assimilation,”
and this approach entailed the grooming of an ilustrado leadership class in the
early part of the twentieth century. The Americans shifted their support from the
Partido Federalista to the one Recto had joined, the Partido Nacionalista, which had
been formed in 1906 by the merging of the Partido Independentista and the Union
Nacionalista. Their campaign succeeded: in the first elections to the Philippine
Assembly on July 30, 1907, the party in which Manuel Quezon and Sergio Osmeña
would rise to prominence won the majority of seats (Francia 168). Others among
its foremost founding members were Rafael Palma, Macario Adriatico and Leon
Ma. Guerrero.12 The newspaper that served to disseminate the message of the
Partido Nacionalista, it should be noted, was El Renacimiento Filipino, the one that
sponsored the competition won by La ruta. With a platform calling for “immediate,
absolute, and complete independence,” the Partido Nacionalista gained majority
status in the Philippine Assembly in 1907, thus taking over the lead once enjoyed
by the Partido Federalista of Trinidad H. Pardo de Tavera, Benito Legarda and
Cayetano Arellano. Held under the American colonial administration, the elections
for the Philippine Assembly in 1907 offered a choice among nominees who owned
property and were literate in Spanish or English. The latter requirement, premised
on the access to formal education, virtually allowed only members of the privileged
taga-bayan class to attain positions of leadership under the American tutelage
(Lumbera and Lumbera 1997: 88). Quezón, elected to the Assembly in 1907, would
be appointed resident commissioner to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1909.
Twenty-six years later, in the year that Quezon became the Philippines’s second
president, Recto would write the constitution for the Commonwealth.
Insofar as American imperialism framed the political activity of the
ilustrado elite in the early part of the twentieth century, it is important to recall that
this was a time when pro-American feeling surged among the masses of Filipinos.
Now that the American occupation had established itself, a feeling of relief and
gratitude swept over the newly colonized nation, now that the 300-year misrule
of the Spanish had ended with the supposed dawning of new day of enlightened
tutelage (Constantino 1996: 6). The shift in tastes for American products obeyed
the logic of a larger cultural self-estrangement: made in America became the
very sign of modernization, even as this dependency did its part to perpetuate
the relegation of the Philippines to the status of raw materials exporter, with the
transformation of the traditional landed elite into the brokers and middlemen. The
differences in opinion between members of the aristocratic stratum and those of
American neocolony, would continue to sustain the “sub-ethnic communities” that typically characterized the political
activity of the agrarian age (Gellner 1997: 21). It is important to keep in mind that the drive of the principalia elite to
assume a dominant, unifying role in the new society was welcomed by an American colonial administration in need
of indigenous leaders.
12 Not to be confused with Guerrero’s grandson, the diplomat and novelist Leon Maria Ignacio Agapito Guerrero
y Francisco, who authored The First Filipino, first published in 1961.
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the urban middle sectors come out in the dialogues between Doña Irene and the
journalists married to women of her sister’s family.
The bounded condition of Philippine politics made collaboration, and
not independent nationhood, the name of the game, and the pseudo-democratic
institutions imposed during this formative period produced an electoral system
that allowed such provincial politicians as Osmeña and Quezon to create municipal
networks of alliance that would raise them each in his turn to the presidency.
Power would be shared. Taking the place of the ilustrado as bureaucrat would be
the ilustrado as lawyer and politician within the broader context of a unique and
special relationship between colonizer and colonized.
To generalize about the two dramas, one could say that in them, the
national identity, but under American rule and ilustrado hegemony, is put on
the stand and interrogated. The structure of their every domestic scene is clearly
dialogic and dialectical: a schema could be drawn of the opposing values voiced by
characters in each confrontation. Whereas the antagonists of 1913’s La ruta are to
be located externally, in the American colonial administration, in the unpatriotic
collaborators and newspapers it backs, the enemy of Solo of 1917 is internal: in
this case, the antagonist is identified with a flaw manifested within the emergent
ilustrado class itself. The conflicts that emerge in dialogues among the characters
give expression to their response not only to the colonial institutions that shaped
their lives, but also to one another as members of the same class holding divergent
views, those among the educated elites who should and will form lines of patronage
and networks of alliance and association. Recto’s own background illustrates the
ambiguous identity of the Filipino intellectual as ilustrado.
The Ilustrado as Poet, Playwright, and Fledgling
Politician
Recto worked his way through law school at the Universidad de Santo
Tomas by writing for the Spanish-language newspaper El Debate (Medina and
Feliciano xvii). Gifted polyglot that he was, Recto could continue to study law in
Spanish, which remained the sole official language of the courts until 1911 (when
English was added as the second official language, to remain so until it completely
supplanted Spanish by January 1, 1920) (Constantino 1975: 317). It is clear that
Recto had mastered the Spanish he learned in school and in which he expressed
himself in poetry and drama, followed in subsequent years by a rapid mastery of
English, no doubt facilitated by his previous schooling in Greek and Latin. Tagalog
remained the language in which he spoke to audiences in his native Tayabas and in
the Batangas province he represented. As if following the notion, voiced by Simoun
in Rizal’s El filibusterismo (1891), that “Spanish will never be the general language
of the country,” Recto would publicly champion the claim of a native language to
anything that could be called the national identity of the Filipinos (Arcellana 369).
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Yet Recto harbored, as observed by B. S. Medina, Jr., the “ilustrado ambivalence” of
the articulate Hispanist in a post-Malolos era, pulled by the past that was Hispanic
and the present that was American, and it was in Spanish that he wrote his major
literary works. Recto’s polyglot facility proved a formidable arm in the political
environment that saw the rise of the Partido Nacionalista (Medina 136).
Recto’s literary works were written for the most part by the year he reached
28 years of age. When his first play was produced, in 1913 he was serving as secretary
to Vicente Ilustre, who had headed the Revolutionary Committee in Spain until the
year 1899; and who thereafter led the junta in its Hong Kong exile during the war
with the United States. By 1918, a year after Solo’s premier, Recto turned to writing
mainly for the political arena, mostly in English, continuing to work in a fervent
nationalist vein while contributing to and participating in the ilustrado ascendancy.
His literary production thus falls comfortably into what has been called the “Period
of Efflorescence of Philippine Literature in Spanish,” or the “Golden Age” of 19031942, the nearly forty years that stretched from the beginnings of American rule to
the Japanese domination. 13
Although Philippine literature in Spanish did not “reach” the masses in their
original form of expression, such seminal works as Rizal’s Noli me tangere (1887) and
El filibusterismo (1891) underwent vernacular “translations” with broad-ranging
repercussions. It was the Spanish colonial legacy, transmitted as what Lumbera
and Lumbera referred to as the Euro-Hispanic Tradition, that “informed literary
development during the first half of the entire period of American Occupation.” The
ilustrado Hispanists—Pedro Paterno, Antonio Abad, Cecilio Apóstol, and Recto
among them—affirmed a Spanish Philippine identity, or, more exactly, a Philippine
identity that embraced what was noble and even heroic in the legacy left by the
Spanish centuries. Ilustrados calling on Filipinos to resist American imperialist
seek endeavored to vindicate this unique cultural heritage, and thus establish a
genealogy of “golden age of Fil-Hispanic letters” traceable back to the Propaganda
Movement and the Katipunan (Lumbera and Lumbera 89). Publicly, at least, the
Hispanophone ilustrado writers attempted to fire up enthusiasm for independence
by strengthening the literary culture with works that could be read and understood
by Castillian-speaking compatriots among ilustrado elite and middle sectors.
In 1911, when Recto was 21 years old, he gathered the poems he had
published in El Renacimiento Filipino and had them republished in a collection
titled Bajo los Cocoteros (Under the Coconut Trees). Some of the collection’s poems
draw from Spain and Spanish for their thematics; others celebrate aspects of the
native culture; all of them flow in the nationalist current of the Philippine edad de
oro. Famous among these poems are “Elogio a la lengua castellana” (“Praise of the
Castilian Language”) and “Alfonso XII ,” but also the popular “Mi choza de nipa”
13 Luis Mariñas points out that the apogee of Hispanic Philippine literature occurred in time when the Spanish
forces had withdrawn and the American regime had firmly established itself in the archipelago. Mariñas, referring to
Estanislao Alinea’s periodization from 1903 to 1942, asserts that no new figures worthy of mention appeared after 1930,
and the luminaries Recto and Manuel Bernabé would pass on in 1960 (Mariñas 51).
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(“Mi nipa hut”) (cited in Alinea 160). Other poems remember the sacrifice of those
who fought to free the nation from Spanish tyranny. “A los héroes del 96” affirms
that spirit of the José Rizal and Andrés Bonifacio is reborn in the revolutionaries of
1896, a concept echoed in “Revolución” (Lumbera 2000: 72).
An ilustrado sense of outrage against the American imposition that will
be expressed in La ruta and the cultural critique that will be articulated in Solo
are forthrightly previewed in one poem, appearing in Bajo los cocoteros, that was
first published in December 1910. The “Epopeya de la raza” (“Epic of the Race,”
CW 67-73) offers itself, in its brief dedicatory, to “the memory of the heroes of
Independence.” The verses of the poem go on to elaborate a sort of racializing
identification of the Filipinos as a people, deploying what could be called, after
John D. Blanco, a stratagem of “race as praxis” (Blanco 2011), but here not as a
practice of colonial racism but rather as a gesture of counter-hegemonic resistance.
The heroes of the 1896 revolution against Spain are the inheritors of Rizal, who
is implicitly the “Moses” who led his own people from a long captivity. The same
heroes are “Paladins of the Idea, bearers of Progress, / Spartacuses and Kozciuszkos
of the Philippine Cause, / invincible under the weight / of three centuries of
Conquest.” 14 Under such inspiration, and beneath the standard of the Sun and
the Three Stars, and guided by the examples of the Indios Bravos of 1889 and the
Katipunan revolutionaries of 1896, the Filipino nation conceived in the text as raza
is called again to become the protagonist of its own epic struggle for “Independent
Status”: although the native limbas prevailed over the lion of Spain, segreant and
rampant, yet that Philippine bird of prey, “bloodied,” “livid and battered,” must now
flee from the Eagle of America. For the new foreign master has “nipped [tronchó]
the morning bud of the republican flower”; the “destroyer Bird [. . .] of this winning
Race [. . .] discharged upon us the cascade of its lightning / and the venom of its
wrath.” The poem’s ending bears witness to the aftermath of defeat, now that the
hecatomb has occurred. Pax Americana is settled upon the land, taking the form
of a specious fraternity. For the Eagle is “absolute” by dint of its irresistible might;
the Philippine nation has no choice but to take refuge in the “sovereign shade / of
its wings,” and nurture hope for the future, consoled or encouraged by the thought
that “defeat ennobles.” In the meantime, the vanquished can bear in mind that the
victory is transitory, empires rise and fall. Patience, enjoins the ilustrado poet:
his people must wait for liberty, but all can work, build tomorrow, raise a new
Philippine nation “from the dust of its ruins.” The legacy left by the heroes of the
race will endure.
14 The invocation of Andrzej Tadeusz Bonawentura Kościuszko (1746-1817) is telling, since, as the Supreme
Commander of the Polish National Armed Forces, it was Kościuszko who led the 1794 uprising against the Russian
Imperial Army and the Prussian Army.
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With the plowhandle of the laborer and the parliamentary word
will flourish on Calvary
the Great Tree of the Idea.
The present now is dead,
To liberate it is impossible, because it has been condemned.
So, then, let us free the future, watching over the seed
that has been cast
in the furrow of souls
by our heroes who died, conquering eternal glory.15
Keeping hope alive, in this ilustrado conception, means saving the seed of a
not yet attainable Philippine sovereignty and autonomy. Guided by the ilustrado’s
pragmatic idealism, the nation must take custody of that which the patriots have
sown. If Spain is the undeniable, though not unproblematic, Madre Patria, the
culture and language that its conquistadors and colonizers established in the Asian
colony created a connection to a patrimony that linked the Philippines not only
with Spain but with the republics that once were Spanish colonies. Implicitly, as the
poem indicates by its authorship, genealogy and very language, the ilustrado will
accept guardianship of the legacy.
In the year prior to La ruta’s premier, in 1912, the Democrat Woodrow Wilson
won election to the U. S. presidency, giving Filipino nationalists reason to hope
that he, with support from the Democratic Congress, might feel ready to grant
independence to the islands. Although Recto’s mentor Quezon may have had his
private doubts about his country’s preparedness for independence, his public
endorsement of it assured his continued popularity among the masses, whose
optimism was further encouraged by the introduction of the Jones Act in March
1912, the bill that would have granted independence that same year. Quezon of
course was arguing against Quezon, for, as Governor-General Forbes interpreted
his intentions, Quezon believed that continued American tutelage for the
Philippines was in the best interests of the Filipinos, not to mention his own political
ambitions. The version of the Jones Act that would be passed in 1916 promised that
the grant of independence would materialize “as soon as a stable government could
be established” in the Philippines, providing as well for a government organized
into three branches like that of the United States, including the Quezon-proposed
15 Con la esteva del obrero y el verbo parlamentario
florecerá en el Calvario
el Gran Arbol de la Idea.
Está ya muerto el presente. . .
Libertarlo es imposible, porque ha sido condenado.
Pues, entonces, libertemos el futuro, custodiando la simiente
que han echado
en el surco de las almas
nuestros heroes [sic] que murieron, conquistando eternas palmas.
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bicameral legislature, and for a bill of rights. The Jones Act thus advanced the
process of Filipinization continued under the term of Governor-General Francis
Burton Harrison. Still, the Filipinos remained under the obligation to prove to the
Americans that they were capable of governing themselves. To do so was the charge
of the “independence mission” to Washington of which Recto was a member, and
by which delegated leaders argued their case while at the same time maneuvering
for electoral gains from a Filipino populace that by this time was convinced,
paradoxically, that political autonomy for their country would necessarily require
Washington’s pledge of continued support (Constantino 1975: 329-330). Early
in 1913, however, Recto raised a cry in demand for “absolute independence” for
the Philippines, arguing that protection from the United States was unnecessary
because any threat of foreign aggression was minimal: European countries refused
to challenge the North American hegemony, Japan had other preoccupations, etc.
Independence, in Recto’s explicitly stated view, would allow the Filipinos to become
“more owners” of themselves and to develop their country’s natural resource all to
better effect.16
Recto’s own political career began in 1913, the year of La ruta. Recto joined
the staff of the Philippine Commission under the watchful eye of the Wilsonappointed Harrison. Having earned his Bachelor of Law degree and a masters degree
from the University of Santo Tomas and amply demonstrated his talents, Recto
would be recruited as an advisor to the first Philippine Senate in 1916 (Bernardo
130; Constantino 1975: 334). The following year would see the production of his
second and final drama. Like La ruta, Recto wrote Solo entre las sombras in part
to win the prize of a contest. What follows now is an analytic reading of each of
Recto’s domestic dramas. An overview of each drama will serve to reconstruct the
form of each work and frame the references it makes to the sociopolitical context
and the ilustrado’s changing, contested role within it.
Checking the Fourth Power
La ruta de Damasco depicts life of journalists—that is, of Filipino
newspapermen and their spouses—identifiable as members of the middle sectors
of the ilustrado class. It is such journalists, the play seems to assert, who keep
alive the dream of independence in the face of not only American censorship
but collaboration on the part of the Filipino principalia who have profited from
their intimate relations with the colonizers. Yet the text of the play, a showcase of
public statements, hosts an interstitial message in which a real political agenda is
rehearsed. In the gap between what the journalist characters advocate in the play
16 “Mirando afuera: sobre una profecía de Rizal,” Renacimiento Filipino III / 123 [January 21, 1913]: 907-08 (CW
209).
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and what the ilustrados secretly worked for in the assembly lies its covert, perhaps
“unconscious” meaning.17
Among the play’s cast of characters is the family’s suffering matron, Señora
Tomasa, who knows something about the newspaperman’s life: not only is she the
widow of a journalist, but she is mother to another journalist and potential motherin-law to yet another. Bitter experience has taught her that the livelihood of a
nationalist newspaperman in the colonial situation means indigence, and probably
other forms of misery. Jacinto Makaraig, the editor-in-chief of La Integridad, is in
love with Señora Tomasa’s daughter Loling; Antonio, husband to Señora Tomasa’s
older daughter Mercedes, is the newspaper’s director. Jacinto and Antonio complain
that they must fight a daily battle to spread the word of autonomy and national selfdetermination: “public apathy and the excesses of the regime” are what limit their
activities and “oblige us to move within a narrow circle of iron, in a kind of attic
where the air and the light of life find themselves stagnant” (CW 240). But fight on
they must.18
Recto’s drama of ilustrado crisis follows the critical path taken by Henrik
Ibsen’s realist prose dramas: it offers the spectacle of protagonists confronting the
created interests of society that threaten to crush them: but unlike the compact
majority that appears in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (1882) to ostracize the
idealist Doctor Stockmann, the antagonists of Recto’s comedia are not only the
American administration and the principalia-compradores who collaborate with
it, but the mass of apathetic or non-literate Filipinos. Like a Filipino Ibsen, Recto
in his first play denounces a social injustice, a violation of human rights, which
here is the censorship imposed by the American regime on the native Philippine
press. In reenacting recent events, the play made an audacious statement on the
U.S. suppression of newspapers that dared to publish material that was judged
“seditious.”19
17 Pierre Macherey’s A Theory of Literary Production (first published in 1966) articulates a notion of interpretation
as a “production” by which the text speaks out of its gaps, silences or absences.
18 Recto in his editorials often praised the heroism of the ilustrado journalist, as in the article “Periodistas filipinos”
of April 14, 1913 (CW 218-220). Max Bernard was another of the honorable company of the visionary and unadapted
idealists, one who dedicated his work to “social regeneration.” He stands in the company of Tolstoy, Kropotkin, Socrates
and the Spanish journalist José Nakens Pérez (1841-1926). In more sweeping terms, Recto’s “Del sublime apostolado[,]
el periodista” (CW 167-169), published in the Renacimiento Filipino (II .97) on July 7, 1912, sings the praises of the
journalist on the occasion of the newspaper’s second anniversary. No demagogue is the newspaperman, declares the
opinion piece, but rather a derided would-be redeemer of humanity, one who honorably has sought to “guide through
channels of sensibility the disoriented public opinion.”
19 Among the judges of the contest were newspapermen already under notice: José Ma. Romero, Teodoro M.
Kalaw, Manuel Ravago, Macario Adriatico, and Joaquín Pellicena Camacho (CW 229). A Philippines genuinely for the
Filipinos was foremost on the mind of Teodoro M. Kalaw (1884-1940), another model for Recto (Medina and Feliciano
55). Kalaw, who served as one of the judges for the Renacimiento contest, was the legally-trained journalist who from
the pages of El Renacimiento issued an aggressive critique of an American imperialist regime corrupted by graft. From
the newspaper he promoted the formation of a national language and advocated for independence. Kalaw also served
as president of the Asociación Hispano-Filipina. Contest judge Joaquín Pellicena Camacho, in the prologue he wrote
for the piece, calls it a “nationalist allegation” whose message of love of country transcends fashion and daily life and
maintains a vital link to the struggle for independence. And by its achievement, displaying the great progress that
theater has made since the premier of José el carpintero by the Dominican Juan Zulueta de los Angeles in 1880, Recto’s
play does “[mark] the beginning of a new stage in the history of the literature of the country” (Camacho 224, 225, 226).
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As a visitor and favored guest in the household, the Spaniard Don Florencio
serves as a sort of chorus that comments on the action of the drama and makes
observations that link the Filipino present with a Hispanic past. Doña Irene, the
aforementioned sister to Señora Tomasa, enters the domestic space with two
objectives in mind: to persuade Loling to break off her engagement with Jacinto
in exchange for a promise of a substantial inheritance; and to persuade Antonio to
cease and desist from his patriotic crusade and to accept a well-remunerated post
in the colonial bureaucracy, which she can obtain for him through the offices of her
already well-positioned husband. Yet against Doña Irene’s creed of “adaptation to
the environment,” as well as Mercedes’ weary disillusionment weariness, Antonio
remains steadfastly dedicated to his cause, bolstered as he is by Don Florencio’s
vision of moral progress and fired up by Jacinto’s angry idealism (CW 267, 271).
La ruta is a play of ideas, expressed and contested dialogically. In staging the
battle waged by Doña Irene’s accommodationism against Señora Tomasa’s family’s
pro-Philippinism, the play represents the antagonisms inherent in the relationship
between an urban elite, which includes an aristocratic stratum, and an urban middle
sector, one that consisted in reality of the labor force of jornaleros, professionally
educated and skilled office workers, and members of the petite bourgeoisie called
empleados, from whose ranks emerged the likes of Andrés Bonifacio, Aurelio
Tolentino, Isabelo de los Reyes, Fernando Ma. Guerrero, and others connected with
the 1896 Revolt. Unequal in resources to the urban and landowning aristocrats, the
ilustrados, as Cullinane observes, “must be viewed as a subset of the larger elite and
not as a separate class within the society (Cullinane 17-18, 22, 32).
At stake here in the dramatic conflict as in the social sphere is the claim of the
ilustrado subset to the role of first Filipinos and to leadership of the Philippine
nation. “Who is to represent the Filipinos?” This is the fundamental question, both
political and artistic, that the play poses to its audience of ilustrados and other
educated elite. How Recto makes this argument through the play’s construction is
by seeking an ilustrado compromise between the ideal and the real, translated as a
struggle between the right to a free Filipino press and the pressure of sociopolitical
forces that aim to smother dissidence. The government has made telling the truth
a dangerous business, for, as Jacinto has earlier stated, “Any little gust of air from
above can break the thread from which hangs that sword of Damocles that dangles
over our heads” (CW 263, 274). What the text of the play therefore creates and
claims at the same time is a space for acceptable dissent, for contained rebellion,
from which the nationalist ilustrado may give voice an independentist credo while
searching for other opportunities. In the play, the ilustrado represents himself as a
family man, examining his role and risk as public intellectual in a colonial situation.
The ilustrado self-examination begins in Scene I, in which Señora Tomasa
and her daughters, awaiting the arrival of their wealthy sister and aunt, scoff at
The nationalist message of La ruta de Damasco pushes back against the censorship imposed by the American regime,
its consequences suffered by the courageous journalists represented by the drama’s key characters.
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the indolence of such late-sleeping “people of quality” (gente de calidad), but they
laughingly scorn as well the half-wit of a deputy who paid a visit to their home
to insist that Antonio publish his speeches. The same deputy, the women recall,
forwarded a bill demanding that the government prohibit the passage of typhoons
through the northern provinces. The outlandish request, adds Mercedes, came
from a member of the “conservative” minority (CW 232, 233).
It is evident by her words and demeanor that Doña Irene has benefitted from
her family’s collaboration with the American regime. Her promise to Mercedes
that later on she will bring her a birthday gift of “a ton of sorbet,” rather than some
traditional dessert of, say, halo-halo or bibinka, serves up a sign of the times (CW
244). Other references make clear that Doña Irene’s sanctimony (“I have just heard
four masses and a sermon”) and her automobile (its horn beeps in the background)
belongs to the urban elite who have found a cosy convivencia with the colonizers,
and her visits to the Eiffel Tower and the White House and her having kissed the
sandals of His Holiness guarantee her brand of creole cosmopolitanism. Doña
Irene complains of Antonio, calling him a tunante (“rogue, villlain”) who criticizes
her husband and “the whole Government” in his newspaper. She offered to seek
a position comparable to her husband’s for Antonio, she reminds Mercedes, but
he has refused, allowing himself to be blinded by “those spiderwebs of patriotism
that prevent him from seeing the true aspect of life” (CW 244-245, 248). Mercedes,
at her wits’ end for stretching the meager housekeeping allowance to cover the
needs of a household with its four sons, has reached the point where she is willing
to abandon idealism for the sake of the family’s welfare and go along with Doña
Irene’s renewed efforts to steer her husband away from journalism and toward
a government job. The exchange between Jacinto and Mercedes foregrounds
an opposition between conflicting values: Mercedes answers the idealistic
pronouncements of her patriotic brother-in-law with the words, “The idea of the
family is superior to the idea of country [patria].” For Jacinto, on the other hand, the
“imperious cry of duty” calls one to sacrifice “for the health of the mother country”
(CW 242). Loling, also refusing to be bought off by her aunt, will pledge undying
devotion to her Jacinto and to the patriotic ideal he embodies. Her commitment to
the ideal represents the manner in which the ilustrado as members of the educated
elite may rise above self-interest, pragmatism and “realism” so as to embrace the
greater good and lead the nation to “la libertad de nuestra patria” (CW 255). It is up
to Loling to sound a conciliatory note in this domestic debate between Mercedes
and Jacinto, or between family and nation: “I don’t see the incompatibility of both
interests,” she offers. “The ideas of country and family, not only do they not exclude,
but they complement one another” (CW 242).
Yet the challenges are daunting for these nationalist ilustrados. Jacinto explains
to Loling, on the last two pages of the script, that a Damoclean sword hangs
over his head: he anticipates being arrested for having authored and published
an editorial that has insulted “a certain man of stature.” The man of stature, a
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government functionary, has sued the paper for libel, and “the government has
made common cause with the one who believed himself offended.” The charge
leveled against the anxious Jacinto is for publishing an editorial accusing a public
official of malfeasance. With this report, the play makes oblique reference to the
cause célèbre that arose when El Renacimiento published an editorial by Fidel Reyes
titled “Aves de Rapiña” (“Birds of Prey”). The editorial, appearing in the 10 October
1908 issue of the newspaper (which published a version in Tagalog, the Muling
Pasilang), criticized statements made by the influential American civil servant
James A. LeRoy. LeRoy, as former secretary both to the Philippine Commission
and to Secretary of the Interior Dean C. Worcester, went on to become private
secretary to Secretary of War and former governor of the Philippines William H.
Taft in 1905. The Renacimiento editorial denounced the assertion made by LeRoy
that Taft, responsible (as the Philippines’ first civilian governor, 1901-1903) for a
“policy of attraction” in the islands, had proven to be “the best and most influential
friend of the Filipinos.” El proceso de “El Renacimiento,” as the trial came to be
known, issued from a libel suit charged by Worcester in response to the editorial.
Accused of sedition and libel, El Renacimiento was forced to shut down its presses
in 1908, closing down with it one of the last journalistic publications in Spanish
language in the Philippines (Càno 395, 397, 409). The story of that unequal battle
is illustrative of the ilustrado class’s struggle for recognition and accommodation
under the American administration, and of the lesson learned when the limits had
been tested.20
Recognizable in La ruta is social critique with comic panache of Oscar Wilde
(1854-1900) and the satire of “created interests” set in motion by Jacinto Benavente
(1866-1954). Also discernible is the trace left in the play of Spain’s Generation of
’98, the group of writers, essayists and artist who sought to revive the spirits of
apathetic and abulic compatriots in the wake of the “debacle” of 1898. The script
of Recto’s play suggests that a spiritualized Spain, its casticismo identified with
the Archipreste de Hita, Don Quixote and Santa Teresa, can prove a wellspring
of regeneration even for the former Hispanic Asian colony. Continuing on the
20
Recto’s article of 28 July 1912 titled “El periodismo en Filipinas por la pendiente de la bancarrota” (“Journalism
in the Philippines on the Slope of Bankruptcy,” CW 169-173) continues on the same theme; namely, the condition of
Philippine journalism under colonialism, but it shifts the focus to the economic dimensions of the current dilemma.
Of a population of eight million Filipinos, writes Recto in a statement echoing one made in La ruta, only five or six
thousand subscribe to the largest-selling newspaper. Such indifference or neglect belies the Filipinos’ claim to living in
a civilized society that supports the talented and genial members of the “race.” Under such circumstances, newpapers
in the Philippines must struggle to survive on the insufficient support they receive from some few “disinterested spirits.”
Further illustrating the precarious financial state of Philippine journalism is its comparison with the American-based
newspaper industry in the islands. A reporter of the Free Press, Recto reports, basing his reference on what he calls a
reliable source, will make more than 250 pesos, which is what a Filipino newspaper editor will earn. And the seasoned
editor who writes opinion pieces or articles “de fondo” (in depth, on current issues) will probably receive no more
in salary than 80 “pesillos,” 120 at most. The lack of adequate remuneration paid to the Filipino journalist signifies a
tendency in the national psyche to prefer “lo importado, lo exótico, lo occidental,” which is, so to say, American; with
this loss of support the press can lose its effectiveness as the Fourth Power to critique the abuses and excesses of the
American regime. The “abdication of the Ideal” will leave the public in “the sad condition of a flock of sheep, disposed
at all hours to be sacrificed in the slaughterhouse of the Government, with the stupid resignation of the pariah and the
helot, [and] exploited by birds of prey.”
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theme of regeneration, corroborating Jacinto’s less than sanguine prognoses for
the country, Don Florencio supplies a diagnosis:
The sickness of the century, señora. [. . .] Our society is neurasthenic. We are the men
of today richer, wiser, more progressive, in a word, than our grandfathers, but also sadder.
The contemporary soul, despite the magnificences of the century, social inequality, the
privileges. . . . (CW 258)
It is a vague diagnosis: a general condition of destitution and the insufficiency
of Americanizing modernization have brought on a chronic fatigue; one could
clarify that the problem of social inequality and privilege are not merely two more
afflictions of the contemporary soul, but the latter is the cause of the former, and
both are experienced by the ilustrado as merely depressing. But in the Spanish
heritage, which the ilustrado conserves and honors: there is the fundamental
element of the idiosyncrasy that is the nation’s identity. The Filipinos are “connected
with moral ties” to the Spanish, Don Florencio reminds Antonio; and it is to Spain
that the Philippines owes its form of “basic education.” Sadly, the nobility of spirit
he exalts has been violated by the law of libel and the control of the government
by the “created interests” of trusts, and Don Florencio cannot but note that the
Philippines is becoming “the empire of plutocracy” (CW 262, 263, 264). In the face
of Americanization, this link is essential to recall: “The affections engendered by
a community of culture, of religion, of history, of language, of civilization and of
aspirations—time cannot erase them, nor progress, nor future conquests” (CW
262). In manner comparable to that of Uruguayan modernista José Enrique
Rodó in his Ariel (1900), Don Florencio implies the contrast between the “Latin”
temperature of the Filipinos and the “Saxon” mindset of the Americans in a way
that positions the ilustrado for his intermediary role as intercultural broker.21
Voicing in this small oration what is perhaps the play’s most direct indictment of
the colonial acculturation, Don Florencio pronounces the word of cultural survival
and resistance, nurtures the Hispanic seed that the ilustrado would save in order to
hold out against cultural inanition.
Jacinto, in answering Loling’s misgivings about the possible lack of
resources in the couple’s future, has Spain on his mind as well. In a burst of
romantic nationalism, he declares that his only treasure is ideas and conviction,
his only ambition, “the freedom of our beloved country.” In this quest, he bears
a resemblance to the knight of La Mancha, and he later on identifies himself as a
“Quijote moderno” who would “give kicks against the pricks” (CW 255, 273). But now,
in the aftermath of 1898, Jacinto draws attention to what is happening elsewhere
21 The leading “theoretician” of Spanish American modernismo, Rodó in Ariel gave voice to an anti-imperialist
denunciation in a language of symbolist and parnassian preciosity; its critique was worded in the terms of an intellectual
unease. Rodó’s affirmation of the Hispanic spiritualism and idealism, which found an echo in Rubén Darío’s ode “A
Roosevelt,” published in the Cantos de vida y esperanza (1905), opposes a cultural resistance to what the Uruguayan
writer saw as the invasion of North American values and models under the banner of an impoverishing pragmatism.
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among Spain’s last and former colonies in the Caribbean: Cuba has gained its
independence but remains materially dependent on the United States; Puerto Rico,
its nationhood thwarted, has no choice but to resign itself to its fate. There, in the
remnants of the “imperial archipelago” (Morillo-Alicea 33, 29), the Filipinos are to
see reflected their own loss of freedom. Yet the quixotic ilustrado continues his
absurd quest in the name of eight million Filipinos despite the absence of hope or
likelihood of success: the fight must go on just as the show must go on, for the play’s
the thing that consecrates his knight-errantry (CW 264, 165). Taking up arms to
answer that chivalric calling, Jacinto proclaims, pessimistically, that a future liberty
may be the best one can hope for, because significant reform may take centuries
(CW 241). 22 Jacinto of course is not play’s only knight of the woeful countenance:
Antonio, too, has, “despite all his good qualities,” says Señora Tomasa, “a quixotic
spirit” (CW 236).23 Yet it is not Antonio’s “quixotic spirit” that will win the day
under the present circumstances, Señora Tomasa believes, but rather shrewdness,
guile, and cleverness: in a word, “astucia” (CW 236).
The sacralizing of the ilustrado mission has occurred even before the
opening of the play’s action, in the play’s title. This of course alludes to Acts 9:1-21
of the New Testament, evoking therewith the narrative of Saul’s spectacular
conversion to Christianity and transformation into the apostle Paul. With this
metaphorical comparison implicit, the play heralds the ilustrado journalist’s
charge of spreading the message of national salvation and restoring the nation to
its rightful foundations.
In Scene XI Loling takes up Jacinto’s challenge by pledging her willingness
to follow him not only to Calvary, but also as far as Tabor (the Palestinian mount on
whose peak it is said Jesus underwent his transfiguration) (CW 257). The apotheosis
of the ilustrado journalist is completed in the play’s final scene, in which the Loling
and Jacinto join in the love that is both love of spouse and love of country. Jacinto
at this point says he feels the nearness of Santa Elena, the mother of the Emperor
Constantine; Loling lovingly contradicts him, and in so doing makes explicit the
meaning of the drama’s title: “No, it isn’t your Saint Helen. It is your Damascus! It
is the glory that seeks you, that descends upon you. . .” (CW 275).
La ruta made its debut some six years after Sergio Osmeña was elected
to the National Assembly and became its Speaker, and soon thereafter the head
of the Partido Nacionalista. It was under Osmeña’s political leadership that the
party, while professing the objective of total independence for the Philippines,
could play its part in a collaborative relationship between the colony and an
22 Recto’s revindication of the Spanish legacy takes up one of the main currents of Spanish writers at the end
of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth: that of the national self-examination, the Spanish inquiry into its
own identity and the related causes of its centuries-long decline: what British hispanist Gerald Brenan has called “the
Spanish predicament” (Brenan 417).
23 What is quixotic in Antonio is his “Hispanic” individualism and idealism, qualities traceable perhaps to the
influence of Ángel Ganivet’s Spain, whose aptitude is best suited among the dominating powers for “ideal creation.”
This is the Spain that has left its mark on beyond its boundaries, with “the seal of our spirit” (Ganivet 1964: 45, from
1897-V-252 and 46, from 1897-II -183).
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American administration directed by Governor General William Cameron Forbes.
In Recto’s play, as it works through a mediation of differences among character
representatives of the Filipino power holders, the educated elite are identified
differentially (see Cullinane 15, 18). The upper class of urban elites, to which Doña
Irene belongs, were either creoles or mestizos of Chinese descent who enjoyed an
extravagant privileged lifestyle that included mansions and trips to the continent
financed by incomes from landholdings and other properties. Cullinane identifies
such aristocratic families as Manila “the Pardo de Taveras, Legardas, Del Pans,
Alberts, Valdezes, Zobels, Ayalas, Roxases, Roceses, and others” (Cullinane 21). The
wealthy or well-off ilustrados of the audience who possessed the means to attend
performance at the Manila Grand Opera House could see therein a questioning and
cross-examination of their own identity and status as leaders of the new imagined
community of Philippine society under American rule. In the revisioning of that
identity and status, the ilustrado had to make room for the claim of circumscribed
or bounded change that the nationalist-accommodationist party was promoting.
Having suffered the hardships of marriage to a newspaperman, Señora Tomasa
looks dourly upon her younger daughter’s wish to marry another one, and so
she has made other plans for her: she intends to marry Loling to the usurer Don
Félix. Sommer’s notion of foundational fictions as “national romance” once again
illuminates the significance of marriage in this ilustrado home: an “erotics of politics”
informs and personalizes “nation-building projects.” The nubile ilustrada is nearly
forced to choose between financial security with the hoary member of the urban
elite and a life of want and sacrifice with a dissident newspaperman, thus figuring
a desire that may or may not conform to the ilustrado prescription for collective
happiness. By “invest[ing] private passions with public purpose” (Sommers 7), the
play personalizes the process by which alliances are formed and broadened within
the category of the ilustrados. Not only through marriage, but also by the acts of
nepotism and cronyism to which Doña Irene’s immodest proposal amounts, is the
ilustrado class advanced.
The conciliation of opposing loves within the ilustrado household is sought
in this particular romance. The aligning of family loves, and especially between
spouses, with the love of country, is the holy grail of this fiction for refounding the
nation. Jacinto’s declaration to Loling—that “for me you are life, glory, the future,
the country made flesh”—has the effect of sacralizing the nation, even feminizing
it as a sublime object of desire: for she is “everything that is great, in the end, under
the blessed sky of this land of poets, of martyrs, of sampaguitas and of adorable
girls like you, crazy, mischievous. . .” (CW 240). By such declarations, Loling unites
in her being the two loves of the hero as ilustrado journalist.
The resounding and melodramatic note on which the play concludes
notwithstanding, there will be censorship, including forms of self-censorship, of
the Philippine press under American colonialism, and it will continue to rein in the
kinds of denunciation that were published in El Renacimiento and performed in
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Recto’s firt play. Recto’s second play will address another challenge to the developing
ilustrado hegemony, one that consists of divisions and antagonisms that fragment
the ilustrado class internally, within the spirit of its own members.
“So much . . . English!”
Whereas the action of the La ruta begins early one April morning, before 8:00,
the action of Solo is explicitly set to open in October “at five in the afternoon” (CW
304). The punishment that awaits the central character Andrés in the final scene
will take place in the deepening darkness of twilight, with a bell striking six times
in “isochronous” fashion to mark the conclusion of the drama (CW 325).
Briefly, the plot of Solo is constructed as a gradual revelation through dialog
of an adulterous relationship: Andrés, a 30-year-old doctor, has betrayed his wife
Gabriela, 25 years old, in an affair with Gabriela’s own sister, 22-year-old nurse
Marina. The action of Solo is set in 1912, in the house of an upper middle-class
ilustrado family of Manila. 24 The exposition, quickly laid out in the ilustrado family‘s
drawing room, introduces the complicating situation: in reply to Don Narciso’s
inquiries, housewife Gabriela, Don Narciso’s niece, reports on the condition of her
heart, then ill-tempered Andrés explains the origin of the scratch on his face: he
received it in a scuffle in the Club occasioned by an insulting insinuation made by an
acquaintance about Andrés and his sister-in-law. In the series of verbal interactions
that constitute the ensuing complication, in which Andrés responds to accusation
with denial, mitigation, hypothetical justification and outright lies, the awful truth
hangs like a Damoclean sword in the shadows, threatening to shatter the peace of
the ilustrado home as well as bring on catastrophe in the form of a cardiac arrest to
the heart-weakened Gabriela. Tension builds through heated arguments over the
facts of the matter, which turns debate on the meaning of individual freedom and
the value of custom in a changing Philippine society.
The debut performance of Recto’s Solo entre las sombras on June 19, 1917 raised
a tropical storm of discussion over the meaning of its message. With a denouement
demonstrating the tragic consequences of a relaxation in morals, the play seemed
to some to denounce the U.S.-imposed system of education and to valorize, in
negative fashion, the mores of traditional Philippine society. Prominent ilustrados
of the time rose to the play’s defense: Apóstol, Bernabé and Varona, among others,
made the case for the play’s advocacy of a balance between the new ways and the
old, for a moderating reconciliation that would incorporate a counterweight to the
24 Recto’s one-act plays follow the dialectical model of Ibsen’s modern drama. For Hans Georg Meyer, the theme
to which Ibsen constantly returned was “self-emancipation unattained because of the seeker’s own deficiency.” The
description especially rings true for Solo, whose antihero fails in his egocentric attempt to break free of the conventional
morality. The means by which the drama plays out this vain striving is by a “recapitulation of the past”; that is, of a
“resumé” of that “prehistory” whose unmasking via dialogue leads, in the end, to disillusionment (Meyer 9, 10, 13). History
repeats itself generationally in La ruta. In Solo, on the other hand, the secret of Andrés and Marina’s transgression will
have tragic consequences once it is “reenacted”: their presumption of emancipation and vanguardism will be reframed
as destructive hubris and regression.
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“violent saxonization” of Filipino youth. What the play called for, in this view, was
not the overthrow of the American system but a blending of Hispanic and AngloSaxon cultural values (see Joaquin 2001). What remains to be examined is the way
in which Recto constructed this ilustrado self-critique in a drama that revolves
around a social sin whose motives are traceable to an uncritical acceptance of
American-imposed acculturation-deculturation on the part of the ilustrado. For in
holding up the mirror to members of his own privileged class, he encouraged that
category of Filipinos to take stock of their own identities, and to find the resources
and reserves of character that would make them worthy of taking a dominant role
in a dominated nation. The message concerning “violent saxonization,” Americanstyled education, uncritical imitation and language imposition is conveyed
indirectly, by a semi-allegorical approach that imagines the negative consequences
of a mode of modernization that one could call “un-Filipino.” Such reflections tell
but a part of the story, however, insofar as a re-reading of the play discerns what
could be called an interrogation of the paradoxes that haunt the ilustrado mind in
a period when the national community has need of a leadership that knows how to
balance or least negotiate the contradictory elements that comprise the changing
national culture.
In the year prior to the premier of Solo, it will be recalled, it was Quezon as
resident commissioner (1909-1916) who led the effort to approve the Philippine
Autonomy Act of 1916, or the Jones Bill, which would replace the Philippine
Commission with a bicameral legislative body composed of an upper house, called
the Senate and a lower house, formerly the Philippine Assembly. In the same
year, Quezon was elected to the first Philippine Senate, and Recto was appointed
legal advisor to it. The Jones Bill also anticipated the U.S. grant of independence
to the Philippines, at a time as yet to be determined. Quezon’s reluctance to
demand independence too quickly—he felt that the United States would deny it
to a people of whom the majority was illiterate—in effect denied support to the
Anti-Imperialist League and to others, among them members of his own Partido
Nacionalista, who would have preferred an immediate independence. Accepting
support from an American administration eager to put in place a compliant group
of native leaders, the Nacionalistas advocated for greater autonomy, but did so
without calling for removal of the Americans (Francia 168). By 1922, Quezon would
attain the leadership of the Partido Nacionalista. The die was cast, there was no
turning back, the Philippines led by the Nacionalistas would become, despite their
independentist rhetoric, more American, as Quezon would Osmeña have it and
Recto would dramatize it.
As previously cited, the actional “trigger” that begins the complication is the
news or rumor circulating around the neighborhood about Andrés altercation in
the Club on the previous night: Andrés had scuffled with someone who made strong
insinuations of improprieties committed by the doctor with Gabriela’s younger
sister (CW 305). Calumnies and slander, Andrés calls such infamies. Don Narciso,
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who is uncle to Gabriela and Marina, knowing more than he lets on, responds by
giving some credence to the word of gossip, qualifying the “qué dirán,” what people
say, a “necessary evil” that regulates society according to its “canons” of decency.
The qué dirán exerts a powerful moral force on the individual’s conduct; there is
good in retaining such “Filipino” customs, the “[i]deas that have aged somewhat,”
for they are rock-like convencionalismos that form a part of real life: the life “we
live” (CW 304-306). Andrés sharply replies, without admitting any truth to the
accusation, in a manner as it is disingenuous as it is surly: it is better to live not
by the “judgment” of society, but by that of one’s own conciencia—“conscience”
or “consciousness” (CW 306). For the judgment of society, the consciencia of
the community, in Andrés’ view, is nothing but “espectros, fantasmas nada más”
(“specters, nothing more than phantasms”), the product of an “old education” that
is but an “antiquity, shadow of a past, soul of the night.” Gabriela discovers the truth
when she witnesses Andrés and Marina in adulterous embrace in Scene 8, and the
shock of that spectacle brings on Gabriela’s death by heart failure. Devastated by
this tragic outcome, Andrés and Marina in their repentant shame must submit to
the judgment of a higher law. The play’s denouement gives characters and audience
occasion to reflect on how traditional values—the Filipino sense of decency, the
communal link, the sanctity of marriage—have been scrutinized and questioned,
and can still serve the function of anchoring the ilustrados’ identity and sense of
self-worth, or play their part in the ilustrados’ balancing act in the transitional time
under the new dispensation.
The self-justificatory ideas to which Andrés gives expression betray a loss
of noble ideals and community spirit—a dangerous tendency in a member of the
privileged sector who plays a professional role. Luisa, who is a friend of the sisters,
finds much “egoism” in Andrés’s concept of individualism; Andrés on the contrary
reaffirms his approval of egoism, for “Happiness,” after all, he confidently asserts,
“is egoistic.” Each one in society, he declares, should seek his or her own happiness,
selfishly; and altruistic generosity, itself a “true egoism” on his view, will not matter
if the system is truly effective (CW 311-312). Here the radical individualist is cast as
a sort of metaphysical rebel rising against the tyranny of heaven. Cecilio Apóstol
likens him to a Caliban or Persian mythology’s Ahriman, perhaps also to a Lucifer
as “star” or “bringer of light” (Apóstol 293). Whether callously amoral or just plain
diabolic, Andrés will know that Don Narciso knows what provoked the clubhouse
kerfuffle. Andrés’ house is “no California ‘bar,’” reproaches Don Narciso; Andrés
should treat his wife with the love and consideration that are her due; and finally,
the worst of it all, the news of Marina’s pregnancy with Andrés’s child will surely
strike a mortal blow to Gabriela (CW 306, 308-309, 318).
Gabriela’s identification with tradition, community and altruism is signified
by a particular manner in the play, and that is through the symbolism of flowers.
As if to provide a counterpoise to the unsavoury nature of ilustrado selfishness,
Gabriela is seen arranging at several moments either arranging or carrying
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bouquets of flowers, one of which she, in the gesture of love this symbolizes, will
bring to a sick friend. A language of flowers is spoken in the name of Don Narciso
(i.e., narcissus or daffodil), the voice of conscience, community and castilianness;
the “troublemaker” who accused Andrés in the Club is a certain Flores.These
blossoming manifestations recall the steadying presence La ruta’s Don Florencio.
The ilustrado indictment of the “new ways” and relaxed morality references the
explicitly anti-American and pro-independence stance that the ilustrados publicly
espoused. Yet the rhetoric of moral condemnation, while it doubled as a prophetic
utterance against the too-rapid modernization under the Americans, functioned
in effect as an ideology, in Althusser’s sense of the term,25 that misrepresented the
reality of the ilustrado project of collaborative leadership. Part and parcel of this
Americanizing modernization is the new type of education that Andrés seems to
approve in his dialogue with Luisa in Scene 4. 26 Andrés defends the new, “practical”
education, which teaches students to become “strong” and rise to the challenge of
reaching “an ideal for our lives.” In comparing the new style of education with the
old, Andrés calls the latter a “vestiglo,” an imaginary monster, the word deriving
from the Latin besticŭlum (CW 317).
Gabriela and Marina’s discussion in Scene 3 reconfirms the play’s association
of new ideas with the new style of Philippine education established during
the American occupation. Gabriela remarks on the frescura (freshness, lack of
restraint) of the “modernist youth” (jóvenes modernistas) and the “promiscuity of
sexes in the public schools”; Marina, more favorably disposed presumably toward
the new mentality, comments on the greater “liberty” (or “freedom,” libertad) they
enjoy. The educational system is, she insists, lo de menos (the least of it): young
women after all are exposed to new ideas and models of behavior even in their
own homes. Resuming her jeremiad against the new mores, Gabriela notes that
disgraced girls are resorting even to criminal procedures to restore their honor.
“What a horror!,” she exclaims. “We have come to this point with so much progress
and so much. . .English!” (CW 310). Between the lines it is suggested that Marina’s
“miseducation” in the Americanized institution, possibly in a situation of medical
training that brought her in close contact with her brother-in-law, has conditioned
her mentally for falling into adultery, though it would be disingenuous to assert
that a simple cause-effect relationship has developed here between education and
moral behavior. But because English supplanted Spanish as medium of instruction
and conduit of information, the control of both instruction and information
served the purposes of American domination and de-filipinizing deculturation,
cutting off access to knowledge of the pre-American eras and to the traditions
25 As given in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Althusser 127-186.
26 The household in the modern era is sustained in an interrelationship with other units of the operational
structure. Among these interrelationships, that of the “dyad” family-school has taken precedence, replacing the dyad of
family-church (Wallerstein 107; Balibar 102). As implicitly referenced in Solo, the educational system has been trusted
with the professional formation of Andrés and Marina, with the influence of the church institution receding into the
background, yet with its agency manifest perhaps in Marina’s talk of providence, sin and punishment, and in Andrés’s
final “recognition” of God’s hand in the outcome of the tragedy.
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that would tie the community to its past while making room for a new culture
of efficiency, dependency, initiative and practicality. For an audience alerted now
to the deculturating-acculturating function of the educational system, however,
Marina’s assertion that education is “not so important” must ring rather hollow.27
In Pursuit of Solitude
Like La ruta, Solo stages a critique of recent changes in Philippine society
through actions played out in the bosom of an ilustrado family’s intimate drama, but
its critical negations have to do more with deleterious effects of Americanization
on the ilustrado mentality. The shift in tone and perspective that occurs in the
passage from comedia to tragedia can be explained as a change in the form or
modality of denunciation: Recto’s second play criticizes an American mangoneo
(“interference, meddling”) that is not so much political as it is moral and cultural.
Writing in the realist and psychological current already established by Ibsen
and Benavente, echoing perhaps the modernista’s sentiment of pro-Latinity and
anti-Saxonization, Recto reminds his audience of who they are: “the ilustrado as
Filipino,” but also “the Filipino as ilustrado.” 28 More than La ruta, Solo resembles
Ibsen’s more psychological dramas in their focus on character psychology and
family secrets. The internal conflictedness of the upper middle-class protagonist in
Hedda Gabler (1890) comes to mind with regard to Marina, but it is Andrés’ own
degeneracy or amorality that recalls the hidden perfidy of one who appears a pillar
of society in Ibsen’s Ghosts (1881).
Having come upon the scene of her husband and sister’s intimate encounter,
now reeling under the shock of an irreparable loss, a shattered Gabriela, as if to
screen one painful memory with a less sad recollection, recalls that now, today, is
the fourth anniversary of her mother’s death. Gabriela regrets her defaulting on
the “deuda de cariño” that she owes her mother: that is, a “debt of affection” that
easily translates to the Tagalog utang na loob—literally understood as a debt of
one’s inner being or interiority. The one who of course has horribly defaulted on
the debt he owes to Gabriela is Andrés. At the end of the penultimate Scene 12,
Don Narciso, in a statement that is as truly metadramatic as it is melodramatic,
declares: “Aquí se desenlaza el drama de vuestras existencias! Gabriela muerta, y
Marina se va lejos de aquí, con su hijo, con el hijo de vuestra culpa” (“Here comes
undone [as in the desenlace, or denouement] the drama of your existences! Gabriela
dead, and Marina goes far from here, with your child, the child of your sin!”).
Devastating the moral order of the home with an act of selfishness that is sickening
27 This discussion on schooling and education casts a spotlight on their role in the socialization of nationalized
individuals. For there, in the school institution, an ideology is inculcated and languages are taught (Balibar 98). The
legitimizing of the ilustrado ascendancy must continue through publication in the language of power and prestige, and
the question of which language—the former “mother tongue” in which the play is scripted, or the English that Gabriela
associates with the schoolgirls’ shame—does not even entertain the notion of a truly autocthonous language.
28 As affirmed in the subtitle of Roces (2006).
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in view of all its obscene consequences, Andrés and Marina are punished—she
with the shame of an unexpected pregnancy, he with the loneliness and terror of
abandonment, both with the knowledge that their crime has produced the final
and mortal assault on the “weak fortress” that was Gabriela’s heart. The take-away
message is that the ilustrado must uphold the institution of marriage and family. It
is on these institutions, which produce unity among the elite and stability within
the community, and the power of education that depends the successful reordering
of Philippine society under American authority and ilustrado direction.
But the ghost which Marina and Andrés fear is something more: it is a
fundamental Filipino difference from the culture received from the colonizers:
it is a ethos of community and caring, a respect for others of one’s family, and
no less a regard for the sanctity of marriage. This spiritual something is what the
too-Americanized Andrés has forgotten in his hypervalorization of egoism and
individual strength,” even to the point of embracing the cruelty of life and acting on
the need, “[i]n the hour of the shipwreck,” to kill in order to save oneself (CW 318).
Having lost wife and lover, the isolated Andrés, of painfully ambiguous identity,
is left in Scene 12 amidst the deepening shadows of the twilight, and he fears the
sombras. These “shades” or “shadows” reiterate not only the Ibsenian ghost motif
but Don Narciso’s departing curse (CW 325). The path of heartless pragmatism
leads to a spiritual destitution comparable to death, experienced as the death-inlife of solitude. The spectral “soul of the night” that was for him the old education
(CW 317) turns out instead to be the nothingness of a life now absent both of love
and of communal belonging. Ibsen’s ghosts were the diseased legacy of a dissolute
father; Andrés’s ghosts are guilt, loneliness, shame, and, who knows, perhaps the
real ghost of a wife whose death was hastened by the act of a selfish husband.
The tragic death that befalls Gabriela seals the play’s modernista critique
of the practices that were introduced by an América Sajona, or at least associated
with its customs and institutions, as it confirms the ilustrado requirement of group
allegiance and cultural balancing. In the end, the play has become a cautionary
tale to the ilustrado audience in whose own dramas might too uncritically
assimilate the new ethos and mode of conduct. The ilustrado family and the
national community must, the message goes, withstand the destabilizing effect of
new cultural influences, or at least accept them into a harmonious blending of
the constituents both native and foreign that make up the contemporary national
culture. An abuse of patriarchal power or male prerogative is corrected in such as
way as to acknowledge that power and to relegitimate the power of the ilustrado
leader. Educational reform is critiqued, but the Pontifical and Royal University of
Santo Tomás (founded in 1611) will continue to provide a salutary counterweight to
the American-sponsored University of the Philippines (founded in 1908).
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Conclusion
Staging the ilustrado family in his two domestic dramas, Recto re-examined
the class of educated elite to which he and his audience belonged, scripting in effect
an aesthetic experience that served to define and clarify an ambiguous Filipino
identity as an uncertain balance of elements while at the same time coming to
terms with the American colonial imposition in a way favorable to the interests
of the same “directing class” that was coming into its own as leaders of the nation
newly re-configured for the Nacionalista ascendancy. For after all, the right to
independence and autonomy had been denied to the Filipinos. Despite La ruta’s
calls for national liberation, and in anticipation of future calls for abolishing the
parity agreement with the United States and protests against the maintenance
of American military bases on Philippine territory, Recto in his plays expressed a
willingness to set aside the armed struggle and to seek a path of legality within the
bounds of the American system. After Solo, Recto set aside dramaturgy for reallife drama, continuing to write for other venues. He was elected representative of
Batanga’s 2nd district in 1919, and chosen as minority floor leader. He became a
full-fledged member of the ilustrado establishment. As for what can be said about
the community reimagined to the measure of the ilustrado in Recto’s ambivalent
dramas: the nation in question--whether on the road to Damascus or in the
lonely shadows—remains deferred, held in check, but kept in custody by the same
educated elite. Or, in the terms of Recto’s “Epopeya de la raza”: the present is dead,
freedom awaits in the future, the Great Tree of the Idea will flourish on Calvary,
but for now the task is to watch over the seed.
Kritika Kultura 20 (2013): –204
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